Ferret Creator on Judo and Text Indexing #
Okay, here we go. Pat Eyler has a really long interview with Dave Balmain. This is so great, I actually was just searching for interviews with Balmain, but Google hadn’t indexed Pat’s yet. Dave is the creator of Ferret, people. I am cuckoo about Ferret. Talk about fast! And turning it on and fiddling with the switches: it’s just so much fun.
After university I worked as a consultant, implementing J2EE applications. In 2004 I quit my job and moved to Japan to practice Judo. I worked as an English teacher for a year before starting training full-time. This left me a lot of free time to work on whatever I wanted to, leading to the birth of Ferret.
Although Ferret is based on Lucene, it’s recently moved away from Lucene’s file format, but he mentions using DRb and JRuby to get around that. Some code examples, some talk about Ferret’s future. Such an exciting project.
FlashHater
Fun times. I’ve been meaning to take a look at Ferret some time. Any chance that we’ll see a Ferret-indexed RedHanded anytime soon?
why
Prawbably!
FlashHater
Cool! I plan on using Hpricot and Ferret to create my own MicroGoogle! Hmm, I just need a catchy Web2.0 name…
mj
Cool to hear the back story. I’ve been using Ferret for my stolen bike scanning project http://finetoothcog.com/
It’s been ferretly fun so far!
Ezra
Man a real object database for ruby based on ferret backend sounds very cool. I hope Dave gets to build that.
FlashHater
Ezra: Like index.persist(object), using all the instance and class variables with search to boot? That’d be awesome, an I don’t think too awefull hard. Meanwhile, I’m trying to write a Hpricot scraper for _why’s blog and index it into Ferret. (removing everything but content (aka tags) is a PITA …)
M.A.H.G
WellCome To Mubashar Altaf Hussain Ghumman.